Just over four years ago we saw the Golden Dragon Acrobats perform Cirque Ziva. The founders of Golden Dragon Acrobats created Cirque Ziva as a special touring production in 2011. This show was quiet similar to that performance, (I wasn’t sure if, since it wasn’t called Cirque Ziva, it would be very different) but there were some minor changes that were pretty exciting.

More exciting was that since the kids were much younger four years ago, they didn’t exactly remember things that well, so they were pretty thrilled by everything.

I had mentioned that Cique Ziva had flash in costumes and sets. For this show the costumes were certainly here, although the sets were pretty simple.

As you can see from the “setlists” below, the acts were pretty similar and in pretty much the same order. The show opened with the thousand hands.

Since the acts were basically the same, I’m going to copy much of what I wrote then and see if I have any updates: (more…)

It’s Chinese Acrobat time again! One year ago we saw the Peking Acrobats at RVCC and this year it’s time for the Golden Dragon Acrobats!

The Golden Dragon Acrobats performed a series of exciting and amazing feats on stage. It was not quite the spectacle of last year’s Peking Acrobats, although there were many similar elements. The Peking Acrobats were completely over the top. Cirque Ziva felt a little smaller but with more flash in costumery and sets.

It opened with a series of…wheels? Round cage-like apparatus that you climb in and roll around–C. and I actually saw these in a Jackie Chan film recently–they seemed to be a part of Chinese military training (somehow). But the Golden Dragon Acrobats did much more than Jackie did with them. With different sizes and numbers of participants they used these wheels to wondrous effect–spinning and rolling and climbing on and off. It was mesmerizing.

And then it was time for the women to show off. The first item was called “Thousand Hands.” Six identically dressed women (with super long golden nails) stood one behind the other and then their arms spread out in a wild and wonderful array. They worked in beautiful synchronicity and it looked amazing. For Peking we were upstairs in the balcony, and being able to see all six women from the top spoiled the effect somewhat, it was much more impressive here. Then they moved onto more, amazing contortions (see the poster above which I don’t even understand even though I saw her do it). They did both group formations and an individual performance (and we all agreed the woman was mind blowing and a little gross). (more…)